Saturday, January 22, 2011

The Fireside Chat (and SOTU Preview) for January 22, 2011 (VIDEO)

Yeah, I know. It's way late.



President Obama discusses the steps he is taking to make America competitive in the short and long terms, and why he chose GE CEO Jeff Immelt to head up the new Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Everything's going to hell...unless it isn't...

In the span of twenty minutes, you were told, most assuredly that things were either total crap on the Violent rhetoric front...or getting much better...by two Hosts of two different shows on the same network.

First, we had Keith's Special Comment from Monday night...



...which bled into Rachel's segment containing happiness, sunshine, rainbows and unicorns (well, happiness, sunshine, rainbows and unicorns for her):



In truth, this is Liberalism. We have debates even among each other. We don't always agree (see: Deal, Tax Cut...and Option, Public), but at least we have the debate. It's not like a version of Colbert's frequent question: "George Bush, Great President...or the Greatest President?!?"

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White House White Board: The Cost of Repeal...

The first White Board without the Goolsbee!

Jonathan Cohn: "Why Today's vote matters"

A very nice article from a guy who's been watching this fight for the last couple of years. But the killer paragraph(s) were these:

Today's House vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act is merely symbolic. The Senate will almost certainly not pass it and, even if it did, the president surely would not sign it.

But symbolism matters. It sends a message about values. And so it's worth considering what values this generation of Republicans has decided to embrace.

Over the last year, the Republicans have spent a lot of time arguing that the Affordable Care Act will cost too much, that it will micromanage care, that it will burden business with taxes and bureaucracy. The most outrageous claims, like the notion of government-run "death panels," have zero basis in fact. And even the less explosive arguments frequently rely on flimsy evidence. But the most remarkable thing about the Republican campaign against health care reform is what the advocates of repeal haven't said.

They never bothered to engage with the fundamental moral logic behind the Affordable Care Act--that a modern society guarantees everybody access to doctors, hospitals, and the treatments they provide; that it's wrong to sit by and watch people give up their savings, or their lives, just because they happened to get sick. They have some ideas, yes, but nothing that would come remotely close to insuring 30 million people or bolstering coverage for the people who have it.

As recently as the last debate over health care reform, in the 1990s, prominent Republicans showed sincere interest in finding common ground in order to achieve similar goals. And there are, I know, honest, caring conservatives who still feel the same way. But the Republicans in the House? If they too are committed to helping the un- and under-insured, they haven't shown it.